Category Archives: Germany

Thanks to extraordinary military conditions, underpinned by equally unprecedented social, economic and political upheavals, a war that couldn’t possibly last for more than a few weeks was still raging out of control nine months later. It seemed reasonable to assume – no, it was reasonable to assume that it couldn’t last much longer, so when the main belligerents contemplated their big moves in spring 1915 they did so in a spirit of military optimism. Whether pouring resources into existing fronts, widening their military horizons to take in less direct routes to victory or experimenting with new weapons and tactics, strategists everywhere operated in the understandable belief that one big push in the right place must bring an end to the War’s unnatural life, and planned accordingly.

A quick tour d’horizon should illustrate the point.

Let’s start with the exception to the rule, Serbia, which had survived three invasions in 1914 but had been completely exhausted by the effort, and was still deep in the process of licking its wounds and reorganising what was left of its army. Quite incapable of any aggression and surrounded by enemies intent on its demise, Serbia was focused only on survival.

Serbia’s most powerful enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, wasn’t really focused at all. Struggling to replace huge manpower losses during unsuccessful campaigns on two fronts, and facing a third on its Italian frontiers, the Empire was showing ominous signs of internal collapse. As well as rising nationalist discontent among subject populations, especially Czechs and Slovaks, shambolic infrastructural management and Hungarian reluctance to share food supplies had left Vienna close to starvation. Increasingly reliant on Germany to shore up its military position, and required to focus economic effort on its well-developed arms industry in accordance with German needs, the Austrian high command was nevertheless ignoring reality in favour of what might be called endgame optimism. Having just abandoned a disastrous offensive in the Carpathian Mountains on the Eastern Front, Vienna was planning towards a renewed invasion of Serbia and offering support for further German offensives in the east.

At least Vienna planned to stick on good defensive positions against the Italians in the Alps. Italy, on the other hand, was preparing to ignore the depleted condition of its armed forces (after a war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911–12), its desperate wartime supply shortages of everything from ammunition to food, and the tactical realities of alpine warfare to launch attack after costly attack on those positions. The Ottoman Empire, under attack in modern Iraq, at Gallipoli and in the Caucasus, was meanwhile facing internal breakdown of supplies and sliding into dependence on German aid, but was planning a new offensive in the Causasus and further attacks on depleted British positions around Suez.

A similar disdain for reality infected planners in St. Petersburg. Having held off the Austrian spring offensive in the Carpathians and Turkish attacks in the Caucasus, they could call on all the manpower they needed but precious little else, not least because Russia possessed none of the state mechanisms that enabled its western allies to wage ‘total war’. Designed by a general staff (Stavka) specialised in factional squabbling, Russian strategy in spring 1915 lacked coherence, took a very long time to get from drawing board to action, and ignored any lessons from recent failures. The result was scattergun optimism, with massed offensives planned for both the northern and southern sectors of the Eastern Front. Forces were being slowly built up for these as May got underway, a process that depleted defences in the centre of the front and weakened Russian armies in the Caucasus, where the need for a defensive posture, though unavoidable in the short term, was seen as no more than a temporary delay on the road to Constantinople and the Mediterranean.

You couldn’t accuse the French war effort of lacking focus in 1915. A single-minded national commitment to victory on the Western Front was backed by an economy capable of delivering total war (at least for the time being), and fuelled by the conviction that enough firepower, properly concentrated and deployed with sufficient offensive spirit, would soon drive the enemy from the gates. This had been the basis of all French military thinking since the autumn of 1914, and nothing had changed by the following spring, so C-in-C Joffre and his staff were simply planning bigger, more concentrated and more dashing attacks all along the front line until the predicted ‘breakthrough’ came to pass.

The British believed in breakthrough and, despite minor tactical differences, were following the French lead on the Western Front, but Britain controlled enough resources to indulge in plenty of aggressive optimism elsewhere. While men and materiel were still being poured into France, the Royal Navy was pursuing victory through blockade, an ill-conceived, under-resourced and ill-led attempt at decisive intervention was stuttering towards disaster at Gallipoli, and British Indian forces in Mesopotamia were advancing into serious trouble on the long road to Baghdad. All these, along with a fistful of minor campaigns all over the Empire, combined to disperse and dilute the British war effort, and none of them came close to unlocking the stalemate in 1915, but within twelve months the British would be at it again in Salonika and Palestine

Like most other belligerents, even Austria-Hungary, the British had a choice about dividing their resources, but Germany was stuck with it. Both its principal allies were in constant and growing need of economic, military and technical support, and it faced enormous demand for resources in both the War’s principal theatres. The spring season of 1915 presented the High Command with a genuine dilemma: should Germany seek all-out victory on the Western Front and merely hold its own on the Eastern Front, or vice versa? Chief of staff Falkenhayn wanted to concentrate on the west, but the need to support Austria and Turkey on other fronts, along with the combination of extravagant promises and relentless propaganda coming from the Eastern Front command team of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, persuaded him to take the less expensive option, a major offensive against depleted Russian defences along the central sector of the Eastern Front.

Eight German divisions were moved east from France and two were transferred south from the Carpathians. Equipped to western Front standards, they became the Eleventh Army under General Mackensen. Supported by eight Austro-Hungarian divisions, and preceded by a four-hour artillery bombardment far bigger than anything yet seen in the east, they attacked along the Gorlice-Tarnow sector of the front on 2 May. Russian defenders, outnumbered six to one, desperately short of even the most basic equipment and denied reinforcements while offensives were prepared elsewhere, simply ran away. By 10 May a chaotic Russian retreat, punctuated by feeble counterattacks, had fallen back to the River San with losses of more than 200,000 men, almost three-quarters of them as prisoners, and by early June the central section of the Russian line was retreating towards Lvov. The offensive eventually halted to consider future strategy in the last week of June, by which time Austro-German forces had occupied all of Galicia, crossed the River Dneister, taken almost a quarter of a million prisoners and captured 224 big guns for a total loss of 90,000 men.

Gorlice-Tarnow was a German victory, no doubt about that, and on a scale that very nearly matched Ludendorff’s sales pitch, but it completely failed to achieve the prime objective of every major offensive conceived and carried out that spring because it didn’t end, shrink or even noticeably shorten the War. Russia wasn’t knocked out of the fight, the two things it had lost in large measure – men and territory – were the things it could most afford to lose, and the main practical effect of the success was to extend Austro-German supply lines for further operations.

In failing to end the War, much of the season’s military endeavour was ruined by flawed planning, refusal to recognise reality or command incompetence, but even when the optimists of 1915 avoided all those pitfalls – as Gorlice-Tarnow did – their hopes were wrecked by a historical coincidence of military, technological and social conditions that rendered outright victory all but impossible. Deride First World War leaders for their efforts if you will, join me in condemning the egoists and fantasists among them, but they were dealing with a world that defied all contemporary logic in sustaining a conflict it lacked the technology to end.

In a world pregnant with the seed of modern propaganda techniques, the second week of March 1915 looked pretty good to the British public. On 10 March, the BEF launched the first independent British attack of any size on the Western Front, up in northeast France, just west of Lille, and after three days of heavy fighting a great triumph was declared. In fact, the Battle of Neuve Chapelle gained the BEF two square kilometres of territory (including what was left of the eponymous village) at a cost of 12,000 or so casualties on each side, and its tactical lessons – that initial gains, easily enough achieved with sufficient firepower, were impossible to exploit – remained unlearned.

More triumphalism followed the Royal Navy’s sinking of the SS Dresden, the last of the German Navy’s raiding cruisers to remain at sea, off the coast of neutral Chile on 14 March, though little was made of the routine and ruthless manner in which the helpless ship was pounded to destruction. The British press was meanwhile presenting Anglo-French attempts to force a passage through the Dardanelles as a string of small successes, when in fact they were a series of blundering failures, and making much of steady Russian gains against Austro-Hungarian forces defending the long-besieged Polish fortress of Przemysl, which were genuine enough but strategically irrelevant.

The week’s most strategically significant War story was held back until the following Monday, 15 March, when the British government announced its decision, made the previous Thursday, to extend the Royal Navy’s blockade against the Central Powers. This was big news, in theory a major step on the road to defeating Germany, yet it was given a relatively low-key reception by British propaganda. Why was that?

The new blockade rules declared an absolute embargo on all goods bound for the Central Powers, including for the first time food, and claimed any neutral vessel intercepted in the course of such trade as a British prize. They were recognised as retaliation for a German declaration, made on 4 February and put into practice from 22 February, that the waters around Britain and Ireland were a ‘war zone’, and that enemy merchant shipping would be sunk without warning by its submarines.

Both announcements were extremely important because ships were the one and only key to global trade. Without freedom to trade across the seas – without money from exports or access to imports of raw materials and food – the world’s most developed economies could not function and grow as capitalism intended, so any nation denied access to sea trade would, in theory, find it impossible to fight a major war for very long.

These factors applied wherever merchant shipping operated, underpinning wars fought by, among others, the Russian, French, Italian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman navies, but they were of particular importance to the war efforts of Britain and Germany. Britain, the world’s naval superpower, devoted a lot of strategic thinking and resources to blockading German trade all over the world, in the confident belief, eventually almost justified, that this would win the War. Germany was meanwhile determined to stifle vital seaborne supplies to Britain, a nation that depended on imports to feed its population, and was ready by early 1915 to make maximum possible use of submarines for the job.

Both announcements also sparked anger and outrage in neutral states. German authorisation of unannounced submarine attacks was widely regarded as barbaric, and everybody recognised that the policy would put neutral vessels at risk. The British blockade had been making it difficult for neutral nations to carry on their usual business, let alone profit from the War, since August 1914, and this latest extension was seen as high-handed, greedy interference with legitimate trade.

Britain, its media and public were not too bothered about being thought high-handed, and identification with martial aggression was unlikely to damage the German regime’s self-image, so London and Berlin were happy enough to ride roughshod over international outrage, even at a time when neutrals of every size were being courted as possible allies… or would have been but for the one neutral power nobody wanted to upset, the United States.

Rich in raw materials and cash, and a maritime trading power rising to rival Britain, the United States was the one neutral certain to make a decisive difference if it joined either side at war. Politically divided between strict neutrality and varying degrees of support for the Entente powers, the USA was already an important economic influence on the War, having sold goods worth more than 800 million dollars to the Entente by the end of 1914 and, thanks to the Royal Navy’s blockade, almost nothing to the Central Powers. This trend would continue, so that by the time the US entered the War in April 1917 Britain and France would have spent a staggering eight billion dollars on American goods, compared with 27 million dollars spent by the Central Powers – but by the spring of 1915 it was already quite clear that, if and when the USA abandoned neutrality, it would do so in support of its major creditors.

The reason Germany made minor concessions to international opinion before putting submarine warfare into effect, and the explanation for Britain’s relatively sheepish flexing of its blockade muscle, were two sides of the same coin. Germany was terrified of outraging US public opinion to the point of war, but hoped to starve Britain before that happened; Britain was equally afraid of souring American opinion to the point of delaying or debarring US alliance with the Entente, but wasn’t about to let go its death grip on the German economy. As news of the economic world war’s latest escalation broke around the world on the Ides of March 1915, it remained to be seen if either submarines or blockades could end the War before US military involvement became a live issue.

Poppycock doesn’t subscribe to the laddish theory that bad generals were to blame for battlefield carnage during the First World War. The generals were of their time, socially and technologically, and it was a very bad time to fight a major war. Most belligerent armed forces produced a few excellent and innovative commanders, and the worst you can call the majority is mediocre. Mediocre isn’t such a terrible score when you consider the unprecedented number of generals needed to command such a vast conflict, and that the advent of million-man armies had the main belligerents scraping the command barrel from the very start of the War.

That said, there were some really bad generals around, and the centenary of 1915’s first big offensive on the Eastern Front – the German attack in East Prussia known as the Winter Battle, or the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes – provides a good opportunity to bad-mouth one of the very worst of them. I’m talking about the man responsible for the offensive, General Erich Ludendorff.

The charge against Ludendorff is nothing so simple as straight incompetence. He was a successful and energetic field commander and tactician, particularly talented when it came to military logistics, who came through the War with an enormous, if largely self-generated reputation based on his version of the German campaign on the Eastern Front. On the down side – and quite apart from a personality built on virulently anti-Semitic, extreme right-wing nationalism – he was guilty of overweening self-belief, vaunting ambition, cynical self-promotion and enormous strategic errors, a catalogue of failings that would have momentous consequences for Germany and the world. Destined to achieve far too much power, he was still a rising star in February 1915, a successful field commander, a popular celebrity and a strident voice in favour of ambitious offensive warfare.

He had first made a name for himself in Belgium, leading a brigade into Liège on 6 August 1914 to threaten its fortresses from within. Promoted chief of staff to the new commander in East Prussia, General Hindenburg, he cemented his fame with a striking (if ultimately indecisive) victory at the Battle of Tannenberg, and although public adulation was focused on the elderly and rather inert Hindenburg, Ludendorff was careful to ensure that he received credit for the campaign in military circles. After the same team was given overall command of the Eastern Front in November 1914, Ludendorff again sought and won admiration for the rapid mobilization and concentration that overtrumped Russian offensives around Poland.

Already in the habit of using contacts on the far right of German politics to help exaggerate his successes, and with Hindenburg as his puppet-like figurehead, Ludendorff had turned his personal propaganda machine against overall Army chief of staff Falkenhayn by early 1915. Popular and military orthodoxy accepted the (entirely spurious) argument that only Falkenhayn’s lack of ambition had deprived Ludendorff of decisive victory in the east. Despite the Supreme Command’s reluctance to commit resources to the campaign against Russia, Ludendorff’s pressure (along with the need to impress potential allies in the Balkans) pushed Falkenhayn into authorising and supplying a major offensive in the east. It was to be spearheaded by an attack in the northern sector, around the Masurian Lakes, that Ludendorff claimed would outflank Russian positions in Poland to force a general retreat beyond the River Vistula.

Ludendorff’s genuine talent was for concentrating his strength quickly and attacking before the enemy was ready. His great weakness lay in believing, time and again, that initial success was the prelude to complete triumph and acting accordingly. So it was with the Winter Battle.

By early February some 150,000 German troops faced a similar number of Russians along a broad front west and east of the Lakes. The Germans enjoyed a slight superiority in artillery, but their great advantage lay in Russian attempts to concentrate for an offensive further south, which had left defences stretched in the Lakes sector. The southern wing of those defences crumbled when the German attack opened on 7 February, and an attack on the northern wing had the same effect two days later. Despite chaotic Russian attempts to relieve the centre, a general retreat began on 14 February, and 12,000 survivors of the central corps, surrounded in the Forest of Augustovo, were forced to surrender on 21 February.

So far, so good for Ludendorff’s grand schemes for a decisive breakthrough, but not for the first or last time exploitation of the initial victory proved impossible. Attempts to advance southeast ran up against strong Russian forces still gathering for their own offensive, the northern prong of the German advance got bogged down in a failed attempt to take the well-defended fortress at Osoweic, and the whole German force retired to the frontier in early March as more and more Russian troops poured into the theatre.

The campaign ended with both sides roughly where they had started, and although at least 60,000 Russian troops had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, manpower shortages were the least of Russia’s worries. In short, Ludendorff had achieved nothing, but that didn’t stop him massively exaggerating Russian casualty figures and claiming a vital strategic victory.

With the Hindenburg/Ludendorff dream team’s reputation as national heroes undiminished, Ludendorff would go on to repeat the trick of portraying short-lived tactical success as strategic triumph, and continue to blame the Supreme Command for denying him the tools to win total victory in the east. As such he could be dismissed as just another stubborn general unable, like so many on the Western Front, to bridge the gap between military techniques and military technology – but the tragedy is that Ludendorff’s star would continue to rise until he became Germany’s effective ruler in the latter stages of the War, when his one-eyed pursuit of the elusive total victory would lay waste to Eastern Europe and reduce Germany to chaos.

At the end of the War he would escape into exile to promote the myth of his own rectitude, the more dangerous myth that an undefeated Germany had been betrayed from within, and the growth of extreme right-wing groups inside Germany. Now that’s what I call a bad general.

I was going to talk about the United States today, a hundred years on from Secretary of State Bryan’s letter refuting claims by the Central Powers that Washington was favouring the Entente. Then again, better opportunities to discuss the USA are going to crop up later, so I’ll make one small point and move on. This is it.

The Royal Navy had effectively prevented trade between the US and the Central Powers since the start of the War, while transatlantic business with the Entente powers was undergoing a prolonged and massive boom. Under the circumstances American traders either looked a world-historical gift horse in the mouth, or they favoured the only customers available. Bryan’s protestations may have been politically accurate – the US was neutral and on the whole committed to taking that position seriously – but British sea power rendered them meaningless in practical terms.

A reminder of the Royal Navy’s importance seems appropriate, because 24 January 1915 also produced that rare First World War phenomenon, a sea battle.

Fought in the middle of the North Sea, the Battle of the Dogger Bank wasn’t much of a battle, but then neither of the forces concerned – the Royal Navy’s home fleets and the German Navy’s High Seas Fleet – was remotely interested in fighting a major action unless they were quite sure of winning. In fact this extended skirmish bore the hallmarks of a publicity stunt, in that it was indirectly promoted by the need for hugely expensive navies to look as if they were doing something.

It looks unfair with hindsight, given that the Royal Navy was performing vital war work all over the world, but the Admiralty was getting a lot of stick from British politicians, press and public by the end of 1914. Its biggest and best warships, widely regarded as invincible before the War, had spent most of the last few months sitting quietly in home ports, and when daring to venture out had suffered a number of high-profile losses to mines and torpedoes. For all its enormous and controversial cost, the Navy had not apparently hastened the War to an early conclusion and, most damning of all in the public mind, it hadn’t even neutralised the manifest (and massively hyped) threat of the German High Seas Fleet, itself largely confined to brooding in its bases. When Admiral Hipper’s squadron of five fast, modern battlecruisers came out of Germany in December 1914, bombarded the English east coast and escaped scot free, popular disappointment in the Royal Navy turned to outrage.

The Navy, thus far reasonably content for its home fleets to act as successful deterrents, decided it had better do something. Five equally quick British battlecuisers under Admiral Beatty were moved south from Cromarty in northern Scotland to Rosyth. Here’s a map, nicked form the Net and removable on request, by way of making the geography clear.

When the Navy’s secret decoding unit, known as Room 40, reported that four of Hipper’s squadron (one had been put temporarily out of action by Cuxhaven Raid on Christmas Day) were to mount a second raid, Beatty’s force steamed out to ambush it on the evening of 23 January. Accompanied by six light cruisers, and later joined by cruisers and destroyers from Harwich, they made first contact with light forces screening Hipper’s battlecruisers at 7.20 next morning. In the belief that he was facing dreadnoughts, slower but with bigger guns, Hipper ran for home, but the miscalculation allowed Beatty’s ships to get within firing range by nine o’clock, and the two forces began exchanging gunfire in parallel lines half an hour later.

Despite some confusion in their signalling, the British drew first blood, damaging the Seydlitz and bringing the older Blücher to a virtual standstill, but concentrated German fire had brought Beatty’s flagship, the Lion, to a stop by eleven o’clock. At this point a phantom submarine sighting and fear of a possible minefield persuaded Beatty to withdraw his main force, and an attempt to send his most powerful ships in further pursuit of Hipper’s out-gunned squadron was thwarted by another bout of bad signalling, which sent them instead to gather round and finish off the Blücher. With the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet – ordered to sea from Scapa Flow as something of an afterthought – still more than 200 kilometres to the north, the chance of a major victory was lost, and Hipper got home without further interruption.

Both sides trumpeted the battle as a victory – and reacted as if beaten. High Seas Fleet commander Ingelhohl, blamed for not providing Hipper with direct support, was replaced in February, and Beatty’s second-in-command was transferrred to the Canary Islands. And although British propaganda gave a narrow points victory enough lustre to assuage public opinion in the immediate aftermath, the engagement later became part of popular history’s case against the wartime Royal Navy for bumbling incompetence and reluctance to fight.

There is something to be said for the argument. British signalling had been poor, and would remain a problem because the lessons of the January North Sea were not learned, but charges of reluctance to fight, unlike those levelled at Navy commanders chasing the Goeben back in August, are unjustified.

For all that Beatty, Hipper and their superiors would take a major naval victory, they were also aware that pursuit of one risked something much more strategically valuable.

For the British, maintaining deterrent status around home waters was enough, so long as the Navy was carrying out its role guarding trade and blockading enemy ports. Losing that status would be a disaster. For the High Seas Fleet, its mere existence kept a disproportionally enormous weight of British sea power occupied, and a major defeat might unleash all those dreadnoughts into the wider War. When the stakes are thousands of lives, ships so expensive they dominated national economies and the strategic balance of power in the war to end wars, perhaps posterity should forgive a little caution.

Poppycock’s War is running a little late, but then it’s Christmas and everyone knows war stops for Christmas. At least, it did in 1914, or so last week’s heritage commemorations would have you believe.

It’s been hard to miss the centenary of that football truce on the Western Front, and it’s been heartwarming stuff. The spirit of Christmas soothes mankind’s savage breast, ordinary men default to goodwill and a kick-about when the chance arises, there’s a whiff of honourable conduct in the air… it’s all very Old World, very British, and you could be forgiven for thinking the Football Truce reflected the respectful politesse of a bygone age. Well maybe, but let’s balance the picture with a glance at what the Royal Navy was up to on Christmas Day 1914.

On the evening of 24 December, three converted cross-Channel steamers, HMS Engadine, HMS Empress and HMS Riviera, left Harwich for positions off the north German coast. Escorted by two light cruisers and ten destroyers, each steamer carried three Short seaplanes, which were lowered into the water some 70 miles from Germany early on Christmas morning. Replacing wheels with floats to create seaplanes was almost as old as flight itself, but taking off from anything but calm water was still a lottery and only seven of the aircraft managed the feat before flying on to celebrate the festive season by carrying out the world’s first naval air raid.

Their official mission was ‘air reconnaissance’ of German military installations in Heligoland, Cuxhaven and the major naval base at Wilhelmshaven, locations far beyond the range of any land-based Allied aircraft, but the Navy also hoped to bomb the coastal airfield at Nordholtz, just south of Cuxhaven, which housed the half dozen Zeppelins then being used as very effective support for German ground operations on the Western Front. The raid’s underlying purpose was a more strategically significant attempt to provoke the German Navy’s High Seas Fleet into leaving port, and ten British submarines had been stationed off the coast to ambush any warships coming out of Wilhelmshaven.

None of the above really worked. Gathering coastal mist prevented any of the seaplanes from finding Cuxhaven, let alone attacking Nordholtz, and they eventually dropped small bomb loads on Wilhelmshaven, inflicting minor damage on seaplane base, a cruiser and a submarine. Some valuable reconnaissance was carried out, and the bombing did provoke the battlecruiser Von Der Tann into evasive manoeuvres that ended in collision with a cruiser, but the High Seas Fleet wasn’t tempted out to sea. Meanwhile all seven Short seaplanes received hits from ground fire, and only two made it back to the British fleet, although all the aircrew involved came through the mission unscathed. The only two men not picked up by British ships were rescued by a Dutch trawler and interned in the Netherlands.

Though the Royal Navy’s Christmas present to Germany, known to posterity as the Cuxhaven Raid, failed in almost every practical respect, its long-term influence was both significant and malign. Trumpeted by the British as a technical triumph, it confirmed the potential of naval air power to both sides, prompting rapid improvements in coastal anti-aircraft defences and encouraging the development of genuine aircraft carriers during the next few years. The raid also encouraged advocates of long-range strategic bombing, adding weight to the theory that aerial attacks on civilian or infrastructural targets could bring an enemy to its knees, while the outrage it caused in Berlin has been credited with influencing the German High command’s decision to use Zeppelins against Allied cities in 1915.

So that was a Merry Christmas from the Royal Navy, scaring a lot of people and giving a mighty leg-up to the theory that would see civilians bombed into oblivion all over the world to no real strategic effect for the next thirty years. Then again, the Navy was merely adhering to Britain’s military policy of the day and demonstrating aggression, essentially for its own sake and in defiance of any seasonal lull in the fighting. The same thinking, designed to keep the nation in warlike mood and the enemy on his toes, lay behind the British Army’s continuous trench raids all along the Western Front that winter, and the military’s stern disapproval of pacifist episodes like the football match.

Did the War take a Christmas pause? Not really, and not if the British had anything to do with it.

It’s Armistice Day, 2014, and something with a Last Post atmosphere seems appropriate. In 1914, 11 November marked the beginning of a German offensive against Russian positions around the Polish city of Łódź, so today let’s spare a little commemoration for Poland’s suffering during the First World War.

During the last 250 years or so, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a European country more mistreated by war than Poland, or a people more martially abused than the Poles. Since the latter part of the seventeenth century – at which point it was a reasonably successful sovereign state, joined to neighbouring Lithuania by a shared monarchy – Poland has been a prime battleground of choice for anyone going to war in central or Eastern Europe. Time and again the armies of empires have invaded, fought over, occupied and partitioned Poland. Time and again the Poles have been conquered, annexed, suppressed and slaughtered.

There’s a long, sad story to be told about the decline of Poland in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but I’ll try to keep it brief. The country was partitioned three times between 1772 and 1795 as Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia got into the habit of invading, putting down nationalist uprisings as they went, and coming to mutual agreement about which parts to keep for themselves. The last of these partitions removed independent Poland from the map altogether, with mineral-rich Silesia in the northwest becoming part of Prussia, the southern region around Krakow falling under Austro-Hungarian rule and the rest becoming part of the Russian Tsar’s empire.

This was roughly the situation in 1914, despite Napoleon’s temporary occupation of the region early in the nineteenth century and further territorial adjustments in the 1803s, 1840s and 1860s, when the usual suspects intervened to put down nationalist or political uprisings. Here’s a map, lifted from net as ever and instantly removable if anyone minds.

The First World War conformed to the pattern of modern warfare by devastating Poland. By late in 1914 the country had become the main focus of fighting between Russia and the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, and an estimated 3.5 million Poles were conscripted into the armed forces of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary during the next four years. A few Poles also fought with the French army as an independent unit, and hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians died as collateral damage. Though accurate casualty figures are impossible to establish, estimates of Polish deaths during the First World War vary between about 700,000 and one million.

The German offensive around the Silesian city of Łódź in mid-November enjoyed initial success against ill-prepared Russian forces and inflicted serious casualties, but was halted once the Russians abandoned their own plans to attack into Silesia and concentrated for defence. Heavily outnumbered, but committed to repeated attacks by front commanders Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the German Ninth Army did eventually take Łódź after a Russian withdrawal on 6 December, but despite Hindenburg’s claims of a great strategic victory no decisive breakthrough was achieved. German attempts to push further east slackened after 13 December, by which time both sides had lost around 100,000 men, leaving the central sector of the Eastern Front in a state of entrenched stalemate west of Warsaw by the end of the year. Poland’s suffering was just beginning.

This has been a sketchy post, delivered late. My apologies to anyone reading the blog in real time, but every now and then real life takes over and prevents me from playing historian for a few days. Never mind, the point I’m trying to make is fairly simple: the First World War wasn’t only, or even largely about Britain. Ask any Pole.

Militarist, expansionist, successful, frustrated, to blame… that’s pretty much the heritage story when it comes to Germany in 1914. It doesn’t tell you much and what it does suggest is, as usual, only part of the truth.

Modern historians generally agree that the main impetus to general war in 1914 came from Berlin, but heritage remembrance tends to skate over the equally accepted view that Vienna, Paris and Belgrade deserve their share of the blame. It also lets us assume, albeit largely by omission, that Germany went to war inspired by some Teutonic imperative to greed and martial glory, when in fact the German leadership’s decision to embrace war sprang primarily from desperate fear of the immediate future without it.

So by way of softening any cartoon images you may have picked up, here’s a beginner’s guide to the real German Empire. It’s not particularly snappy reading and it’s not meant to be, but it should at least demonstrate that Germany went to war for intelligible reasons.

Germany was a federation of twenty-two kingdoms or principalities and three independent city-states (Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen). The biggest component was Prussia, which accounted for 64 percent of the country’s land area; the smallest was the principality of Schaumberg-Lippe, covering all of 340 square kilometres.

They had been united as Germany since 1871, largely thanks to Prussian military successes against Austria and France, and they were dominated by Prussia in 1914. Some of the larger kingdoms – Bavaria, Saxony and Württemburg, for instance – enjoyed military autonomy in peacetime and retained much of their previous national identity, but the Prussian king was Emperor of Germany, with control over foreign policy, ministerial appointments and the armed forces, and Berlin served as the Imperial capital.

Here’s a map, which I will of course remove should anyone object to its use.

Germany was Europe’s great economic success story in 1914. Industrial output, trade and infrastructural development had all mushroomed since the 1880s, and although an increasingly urban population had grown from 41 to 65 million in forty years, some 35 percent of German workers were still employed in agriculture and the country was virtually self-sufficient in food. Along with the United States, it had caught and was overtaking Britain as the world’s leading economic power, but with no colonial empire to speak of Germany badly needed new export markets if its rampant production boom was to be sustained.

German politics ran just as hot. The industrial working class was expanding fast, as was an educated middle class, but the constitution denied them genuine political representation. At federal level, every male citizen was entitled to vote for members of the parliamentary lower house, the Reichstag, but its only real function was to approve measures enacted by the upper house, the Bundesrat. That was elected by partial suffrage and populated by conservative aristocratic, military and business interests, as were most of the regional parliaments that ran the internal affairs of individual states.

Atop this pyramid of yes-men and natural supporters, the Kaiser appointed his ministers and ruled with no real need for concessions to a plethora of political parties that reflected stresses all through the system. Regional differences were important political issues, as were tensions between Protestants and Germany’s large Catholic minority, but the fault line that threatened a political earthquake in Germany was the country’s ever-widening socioeconomic divide.

The regime received qualified support from conservative and liberal parties in the Reichstag but had a real problem with the rapid rise of socialism. Most parliamentary socialists belonged to the relatively moderate Social Democratic Party (SDP), which sought gradual reform but was seen by all shades of conservative opinion as a pack of rabid revolutionaries. Once the 1912 election returned the SDP as the largest single party in the hitherto acquiescent Reichstag, some kind of constitutional crisis seemed inevitable to all sides.

German street politics were even more polarized. Few German employers recognised unions, but strikes had become a major issue by 1914, many of them focused on demands for an eight-hour working day. Socialist community organisations had sprung up all across the industrial landscape, and printed attacks on the regime proliferated in an atmosphere relatively free from media censorship. Every left-wing pressure group, however radical, had its right-wing counterpart, often in the form of ‘patriotic’ Leagues sponsored by conservative interests. Most called for military expansion and a more aggressive foreign policy but some, like the anti-feminist German Women’s League, existed primarily to oppose perceived radicalism.

Faced with rampant economic growth and sitting on a political pressure cooker, Germany’s ruling elites expected revolution at any time during the first decade of the twentieth century. Terrified of reform, on the grounds it would unleash the revolutionary agents of their own destruction, they tried to release the pressure with a policy, personally led by the Kaiser and known as Weltpolitik, aimed at making Germany a world power.

Broadly, Weltpolitik sought to establish a pan-German state, win colonial markets, secure economic domination of continental Europe and build up armed forces. It was supposed to culminate in a short, decisive war against France and Russia, as detailed very precisely in the Army’s Schleiffen Plan. So far, so militarist and expansionist, but by 1914 Weltpolitik lay in ruins.

Attempts to secure overseas possessions had achieved little, but had helped provoke France and Britain into an arms race that threatened German military superiority, while tax battles fought in Berlin to pay for German arms expansion, especially its new navy, had brought political tensions at home close to the boil. With every day that passed the enemy abroad became stronger and the enemy within more likely to explode into revolution.

By 1914 siege mentality had taken a firm grip on the administration. The Schlieffen Plan for a rapid attack on France through Belgium still beckoned as a solution to all its problems, but had to be implemented sooner rather than later or everything would be lost. In that context the Balkan crisis of 1914 and an appeal for help from Germany’s main ally, Austria-Hungary, looked to political and military planners in Berlin like a last shot at salvation.

Once the opportunity had been seized and the world’s most efficient military machine set in motion, Germany’s internal problems evaporated in a blaze of national unity. At that point German civil and military authorities, astonished by the speed and depth of the change, had every right to consider the War an instant success, and to hope that the new patriotism would endure into peacetime. After all, even if the Army failed to deliver its rapid knockout blow, economic arguments insisted that the conflict couldn’t possibly last for more than nine months.

History knows better, and so does heritage. But where history tries to see the past from the perspective of its participants, heritage seems happy to describe it in terms of modern stereotypes. The Kaiser’s Germany, aggressive and unafraid? That’s poppycock.

A hundred years ago today, German and Russian forces fought the first engagement of the War on the Eastern Front. The fight took place at Stallupönen, a German village near the frontier between the two empires. It wasn’t much of a battle, an unauthorised attack by a small portion of the regionally-based German army against the southern flank of an invading Russian army that forced a division (about 10,000 men) of Russian troops to retreat and took some 3,000 prisoners – but it was the start of a long and vastly important campaign that changed the world, changed the War and is almost completely forgotten by the heritage version as seen from the West.

I’ll be checking into the Eastern Front on a regular basis during the next few years, but for now here’s the start-up picture of a theatre of war that raged for more than four years and ultimately stretched all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Given that an alliance dating back to 1892 committed Russia to fighting in support of France, and that Germany was tied to Austria-Hungary by defensive alliance, a glance at a basic map of Europe in 1914 makes the opening battle lines fairly clear. I’ve pinched the one below from the net, and I’ll be glad to remove it if anyone minds.

The Russian and German Empires faced each other along the borders of East Prussia to the north. Austria-Hungary lined up along a disputed frontier with Russia further south, across the then Russian (now Ukrainian) province of Galicia, and all three empires were clustered hungrily round Poland, then ruled by Russia as a semi-autonomous and very turbulent province. Still further south, the independent kingdoms of Romania and Bulgaria remained neutral for now, but both were looking to expand and both would enter the fighting once they’d juggled inducements from both sides and decided which represented the man chance.

All three main protagonists had plans in place for the outbreak of war. Germany had left an army on its eastern frontier as part of the wider Schlieffen Plan, expecting to have beaten France and sent reinforcements during the anticipated six-week delay while Russian forces got organised. Austria-Hungary’s battle plan defied both logistical realities (like most plans conjured up in Vienna) and the demands of war against Serbia on its southern frontiers to call for an immediate invasion of Galicia. The latest of many Russian plans, known as Plan 19, was equally ambitious and smacked of autocratic fantasy. Originally conceived as a simple, massed attack against the relatively small German force defending East Prussia (the eastern spur of Germany stretching up to what became the Lithuanian border), it was repeatedly doctored to satisfy squabbling court factions until it encompassed a smaller attack on East Prussia, a major attack on Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia and the maintenance of strongly defended fortresses inside the frontiers.

Nothing went according to plan for any of them.

From a German viewpoint, the big surprise was that two Russian armies invaded East Prussia as early as 15 August. They didn’t get far, not least because although Russia possessed hordes of troops – perhaps 25 million men of military age to call upon – and had performed miracles to get men to battle so quickly, its retarded industrial condition meant that uniforms and equipment were an altogether different matter. The preliminary battle at Stallupönen set a pattern of well-equipped and well-trained German forces routing their more numerous opponents, but that didn’t prevent a certain amount of initial panic in Berlin at this unexpectedly early development. Reinforcements under the newly paired team of Hindenburg and Ludendorff were diverted from the west to meet the situation, a move that had momentous consequences for the Western Front and opened floodgates to a campaign that would absorb more and more German attention and resources during the next four years. A comprehensive German victory against superior numbers at Tannenberg on 26 August then forced the Russians to fall back and reinforce, bringing the invasion to an end.

Russian attacks in Galicia took longer to get going but met greater success against 10 shambolic Austro-Hungarian forces that were neither up to strength nor ready for operations, but which were carrying out their own planned invasion anyway. The Austrians won the first skirmish, and forced the Russians back across their frontier when the two armies, each about half a million strong, collided in late August along a line centred on the small (now Ukrainian) town of Komarov. Austrian optimism, never remotely justified by the performance of its armies in 1914, brought immediate attempts to push further east, but they collapsed against defensive positions and turned into a full-scale retreat, first to the city of Lvov and then into the sanctuary of the Carpathian Mountains.

As autumn began, the Germans were preparing an advance against the Russians in the north while the Russians planned an attack into the Carpathians, but deteriorating weather and the strength of defensive positions brought temporary stalemate to both fronts, and for the rest of the year all three empires focused their campaigns on the cherry in the middle, Poland.

That was just an outline sketch of the opening phase of the War on the Eastern Front. Much, much more was to come. For long periods, the Front achieved its own forms of gruesome stagnation, sometimes locked into trench warfare around strong defensive positions, sometimes involving huge advances by either side that moved the lines hundreds of miles across vast wildernesses without inflicting any sort of knockout blow. Like the Western Front, the Eastern Front would see strategists and field commanders struggling and failing to find ways of making offensive land warfare actually work, and losing millions of lives in the process.

The total numbers killed in the theatre defy accurate calculation – Russian figures were often guesses and Austrian records were lost when its empire collapsed, to name just two of the problems faced by historians – but estimates of military deaths start above three million, and in most of the regions involved nobody bothered counting civilian deaths after about 1915. Even by the standards we understand from the Western Front, fighting conditions were unspeakably horrible, with whole units freezing to death overnight amid desperate shortages of basic equipment and medicines, especially on the Russian side but also among multiracial Austro-Hungarian forces.

Unlike the Western Front, the War in the east did have immediate and long-lasting effects on the state of the world at large. Russian involvement ended with the collapse of the regime to Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution; Austria-Hungary’s unproductive effort drained and eventually helped destroy its empire; Germany filled the void, took control over great swathes of territory, and then propelled its overall war effort towards disaster by attempting to administer them and exploit their economies. And although a host of newly independent states sprang into existence all across the theatre in the War’s aftermath, many of them still faced prolonged struggles for survival as revolutions and civil wars raged across the region. One way or another every part of the Eastern Front remained at war until the 1920s.

Even slammed together in a few paragraphs the Eastern Front makes quite a story, worth remembering as a human tragedy in itself and because it gave birth to so much of modern Europe. You won’t hear much about it from the heritage industries in the West, and that’s a shame, because attempting to tell the story of the First World War without it can only be poppycock.

We are generally quite well informed about Germany’s attack on Luxembourg, Belgium and France in early August. For the purposes of British heritage commemorations it serves as the act that triggered Europe’s plunge into war, and its adherence to the Schlieffen Plan – a precisely timetabled blueprint for a swift, knockout punch against France that dated back to the 1890s – is seen as evidence of Germany’s prime responsibility for the catastrophe. The story has less to say about French aggression. France had been preparing an attack on Germany since ceding territory to a victorious Prussia in 1871. It possessed its own plan to deliver a knockout blow, and it could hardly wait to get an invasion started.

Plan 17, the French strategic blueprint for war, was the brainchild of Ferdinand Foch, the general destined to end the war as commander-in-chief of allied forces on the Western Front. Adopted in 1913 by the then c-in-c of French forces, Joffre, it was more flexible (and a lot less precise) than the Schlieffen Plan, and reflected the French Army’s dogmatic commitment to offensive warfare as the key to military success. A radical departure from previous plans, which had been focused on defence of the Belgian frontier in response to a German attack, it called for French forces to retake Alsace and Lorraine, the eastern provinces lost in 1871, and then to push further east into Germany through the Ardennes forests.

With hindsight, the greatest weakness of Plan 17 was that it was based on a giant miscalculation. French leaders had spent a decade trying and failing to get a British commitment to defending France if Germany attacked. Joffre and most of his senior commanders refused to believe that Germany would force Britain off the fence by invading Belgium, and steadfastly ignored the possibility that Berlin might interpret Britain’s deeply opaque diplomatic fudging as licence to get away with just that.

Plan 17 did allow for a turn north to protect Belgium and Luxembourg, but this was an afterthought and treated as such, so that even an ominous build-up of German forces around the Belgian frontier in the summer of 1914 was interpreted as good news because it weakened defences in Alsace and Lorraine. With or without hindsight, the fact that well-trained German reserve forces could be brought up to plug any gaps in Alsace and Lorraine might have worried French commanders, but they weren’t the first or last powerful men to see the world as they wanted it to be.

After a delay to be sure the British saw France as victim rather than aggressor, Plan 17 swept into action with a preliminary attack into Alsace on 7 August, its planners confident that an invasion carried out with sufficient élan (by which they meant attack-minded verve and flair) would carry all before it.

It didn’t. German forces withdrew from Alsace to await reinforcements, and although France erupted with joy as the major town of Mulhouse was ‘liberated’ without a fight (and with most of its German-speaking citizens notably absent), a German counter-attack arrived two days later and drove the French slowly back. A change of commander and belated reinforcement did enable the French to regain Mulhouse later in the month, but by that time part two of Plan 17, a full-scale attack into Lorraine, had run into serious trouble.

It was the kind of trouble soon to become familiar on the Western Front. Two French armies advanced into Lorraine from the north on 14 August and attacked the towns of Sarrebourg and Morhange, coming up against the German Sixth Army, a largely Bavarian force deployed along a line protecting the towns. French infantry charges were easy meat for entrenched troops armed with machine guns and artillery, and attack-minded French forces had no trenches of their own in place when German commander Crown Prince Rupprecht (the heir to the Bavarian throne) launched a counterattack on 20 August.

Within two days French forces had been driven back to a line of fortified bases on high ground east of Nancy. Two days after that, on 24 August, the invasion of Germany was officially called off, by which time French, British and Belgian forces were manifestly on the defensive all along the northwestern frontiers of France. On the same day Rupprecht, having persuaded his High Command to divert strength from the drive on Paris further north, launched a major offensive against the French line, only for roles to be reversed as three days of German assaults failed against well-prepared trenches. The sector then subsided into armed stalemate for most of the next four years.

Heritage has pretty much forgotten about the French invasion of 1914, and that means its inadvertent contribution to the defeat of Germany’s invasion is also left out of the story. If the French attack on Lorraine hadn’t failed badly enough to give Prince Rupprecht visions of glory and massive reinforcement to carry them out, the German thrust further north towards Paris would have been considerably, perhaps decisively stronger. That’s history for you – everything connected up in ways heritage, with its perceived need for simple straight lines, finds inconvenient.